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(all images by Bjorn Thomassen) Wedding Photography Courses

Welcome to the 3rd section of the 7 part series "Turn Your Photography Into An Excellent Paying Career".

ADVERTISING AND MARKETING
 

Ok this is the crucial bit that needs a lot of attention. It is essential to have an excellent marketing plan – without efficient marketing you will not generate the worthwhile enquiries that you wish for. You want to be looking for leads that convert into sales.  There is little repeat business in wedding photography and work from recommendations can take some time to trickle through.  It is essential that right from the beginning you advertise carefully.  

Once established, you may thrive on referrals only. In the meantime, however, look at all the different and most cost effective ways of advertising and pursue them avidly. You must always remember that your potential client will look for ‘what is in it for them’, hence focus your advertising on their needs and wants! Think about all the benefits they will get when they book you and promote this within your advertising. It is all well and good to boast about how great you are as a photographer, but they will want to see the real benefits to them e.g. free DVD slideshow, two photographers on the day, back up facilities, years of experience etc. If you want to check out wedding photography courses, we do cover Sales & Marketing on most of our courses.

 
It is very important to find out where clients have heard about you; you then know what is working for you.  At this point, you can put more effort into these areas to make them even more effective. The best way of finding out is to ask your clients. If you advertise in magazines, you can use slightly different email addresses in each magazine, which are ultimately re-directed to your receivable email address. You can identify those coming from the various publications in this way.
 
Where to Advertise:
 
Wedding Fayres
 
There are plenty of wedding fayres out there - do not necessarily go for the cheapest, go for the ones that attract the market you are aiming for. 
 

When you get enquiries at wedding fayres, try to get any interested persons’ email address so that you can send them additional literature or an email follow up at a slightly later date. Any interested party visiting your stand could be enticed to give their Name and Email address in exchange for a free report that you email them afterwards. Bride and groom to be will be milling around numerous stalls and yours will be just another one. If you do not follow up with an email, your details tend to get lost in amongst all the other literature they pick up and you will be forgotten.
 
The Internet and links to wedding / portrait sites
 
If you are serious about your business you need a good website, which needs to be advertised well over the Internet, after all it will act as your shop window. This is one of the best and cheapest forms of promoting your business.  It is very difficult for your site to naturally rank at the top of the search engines straight away.  It takes time and lots of effort and be extremely cautious of those companies wanting to optimise your site via search engine optimisation.
 
Social Media Sites
This form of advertising should not be underestimated and it is FREE. Get yourself on Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Flickr and open an account. You can encourage your web visitors to join you on Facebook and keep posting some really interesting facts for your potential customers. This form of advertising does take time to build but once you have so many friends on your site, this is like having a free list of potential customers to target.
 

 YouTube
It is a well known fact that half of all visitors to the internet will use YouTube now to search for things they need answers to or search for things they wish to buy. Make sure you get a video up there (or several) of you and your business. This is relatively easy to do now with easy to use software such as iMovie or Windows Movie Maker.
 
Also, digital video recorders can be bought for about £150 these days. It is easy to add your photos, titles and subtitles as well as music (Royalty Free music) to make a really professional looking video. You will need to choose keywords carefully when uploading your video. Try to choose those which are not too competitive as your video will be placed at the bottom and never be found. Refer people to your website from your video.

There are lots of video sites out there these days so do not just limit yourself to YouTube. You can upload your video to www.heyspread.com and they distribute your video across many video sites and this saves the hassle of doing it yourself.
 
This is a great way to help your website rankings with Google and it is surprising how many photographers do not bother advertising for free in this way.
 
Google Adwords
You can use Google Adwords but this is a Pay Per Click method, which  attracts visitors with fairly good conversion rates.  This does not rely on your position being high up on the natural search engines. You pay to be at a certain position on google, as a sponsored link.  Specify the geographical area that you cover in your advert as you do not want people clicking on your advert when you are Scotland and they are in London – this will cost you money with no potential for return. You must be extremely careful with your keywords and you must think of all the words that a potential client would put into google. For instance, if you only want to undertake weddings in Gloucester, you could use keywords: weddings photographers Gloucester, wedding photography Gloucester, photographers Gloucester, photography Gloucester and allocate for example 10p/click.
 

You will soon find out whether this is enough as you monitor your viewings on google. You may have to up it or down it, depending on how much competition is in your area. Also you may find that certain keywords work for you and others don’t and this can be changed as you learn more. It is worth having a look at the book ‘The Ultimate Guide to Google Adwords’ written by Perry Marshall.
 
Linking to other sites
Specifically for wedding photography, you can pay to be advertised on another wedding suppliers website. As time has progressed, you see more and more of these sites, so the possibility is that the effectiveness of them has been diluted and it has become quite confusing. They are companies with websites that market all wedding services including wedding photography. An example of such websites are (at the time of writing):
 
www.weddings.co.uk (under Products and Services)
www.wedding-service.co.uk
www.forbetterforworse.co.uk
www.findaweddingphotographer.co.uk
www.photographers.co.uk
 
Advertise with sites that have a good few wedding service providers advertising with them already, as these will be the more popular sites that potential customers visit. Website statistics can give you an indication of the number of visitors a site receives.  However, if the site ranks highly on the search engines (try searching using the keywords that your potential client may use), this a pretty good indication that it is well established.
 
If you do a general search of ‘wedding photography’ in your county (eg. Derbyshire) you will find lots of wedding sites that you can advertise on for little money e.g. www.weddingderbyshire.co.uk.  You will need to put in ‘wedding photography’ and ‘your county’.
 
Competitions and editorials
There are so many photographic competitions out there today. Try and enter as many competitions as you can. The more you win, the more prestigious you will be viewed as hence helping the selling of your services. Also try and get as much editorial as possible in local publications.  This is not always easy, as individuals and companies who are wanting editorial just as you do, are also bombarding editorial staff. If you think up an interesting article with a good twist and provide lots of photos, try contacting all the local magazines and newspapers to see if they will print it. If they have some spare page space and you have done the hard work for them in terms of the write up and preparation of images, they may just publish it for you. It may be a good idea to contact local charities and offer to photograph their events free of charge that could be worthy of a newspaper article. Or for example, offer to photograph for a local radio station for free publicity on air.
 

Shop windows
An excellent way of advertising is using shop window space. This could be in a hairdresser or beauty salon for example – somewhere where future brides frequent. You may have to pay for it, or some shops offer their window space if you are an existing customer as it changes the face of their window for a few weeks.  You could also offer a commission on every wedding booked via them.
 
Affiliations with other wedding providers
Contact other good wedding service providers (local wedding venues, car suppliers, florists, bridal gown shops) in your chosen area and swap details so that they can recommend you if you recommend them.  As an added incentive, you could provide them with free photos of their cars / flowers / dresses that you have photographed on a wedding shoot.

Bridal shops always need wedding photographs and if you know a bride has bought her dress from there, submit some stunning photographs of the bride and dress on CD to the bridal shop and then give them permission to use the shots for their marketing purposes (as long as they credit you and pass your details onto potential clients). Then aim to get your framed photos hung up in their shops for all to see. I have known photographers to become established in major stores where they have a Wedding Services Department and they have their marketing literature within their department. These stores sometimes take part in wedding fayres and if you are already affiliated with them, it is good idea to do this with them and get their big name associated with you in this public domain.
 

Some wedding venues like to give out information packs to potential clients so supply them with an A5 or an A4 leaflet of your photos and services for them to include in this pack.  This can be a good way of getting business at those particular venues. However you may find that they are already affiliated with another photographer and like to stay loyal but again perseverance is the key and you may find some that are willing to include you in their packs.
 
Once you are well established in a venue, it is a good idea to leave a wedding album for display at their premises and this album should show photographs of that particular venue.
 
 Your Own Brand
 
Make sure that you create your own identity that people crave for. Market that brand  with your logo in any publication you may be in (even if your name is just credited against a photo). Also strike up an association with a well known supplier (maybe an elite venue) within your local area. Jointly you can run a competition in a newspaper/magazine and it is amazing what response you will get when you have a well known logo attached and associated with yours.
 
Magazines (local and national)
 

Advertising can be very expensive in both local and national magazines and you have to be generating enough sales to cover the costs.  Generally you will have to continually repeat your advert, as it is well known that one advert will not be very effective.  There are a lot of bridal magazine out there and you need to do some research as to which are the best ones to advertise in. You can ask the publisher what the ABC figures are (distribution quantity), you can ask your ‘brides to be’ which ones they read, you can check out the quality of the publication yourself and gauge which ones you feel more appropriate for your needs. Only concentrate on the publications that are within your working area unless you are planning to branch further afield.  Your advert will need to stand out, as there are a fair few photographers out there competing for the business.
 
Because this form of advertising is very expensive, it may be something that you want to invest in later on if you need to, when you have an established portfolio and business and are really confident about charging for your services.
 
It is also a good idea to make sure your website is up to date, informative and bursting with stunning images, as this will generally be a users first port of call.
 
Negotiate hard for good advertising rates in magazines.  If you want to advertise in magazines, never accept their first price.  You should be paying anywhere from half to three quarters of their first quoted price.  Haggle!  Tell them: ‘no, that is too expensive’ and put the phone down.  Quite often, they will ring back with a reduced price.
 

It can be hard to gauge the success rate of your advert as often people will email you (after seeing you in a magazine) and you cannot tell where they saw you advertised.  If you do have a website try including a contact form with a ‘field’ that asks where the person heard about you. Or you can have several different email addresses in various magazines all redirected to your receivable email address. You need to gauge not only the amount of action an advert generates but also the conversion rate that advert has generated. You may found that Magazine A advert generates more leads than Magazine B, but Magazine B converts to more sales.  This steers you down the line of putting more effort into Magazine B.
 
Local newspapers are not a very good way of advertising. They can be expensive and the advert is always printed onto poor quality paper that can diminish your photographic work. However some photographers find that parish newsletters etc. are a useful and cheap form of advertising in the initial days.
 
Adverts
 
If you are going to place adverts, make sure that you choose an attention grabbing headline that makes the reader stop and take notice. Bold statements directed at the bride such as ‘Brides - A Photographer That Brings Out The Best In You’ or testimonials from other clients in the past are effective in making the prospect delve further. Use images that really sell your particular style on your adverts and that appeal to the bride. She is the most influential in the decision making process. The adverts should always guide the reader on what to do next: ‘Check our website now for full details of our unbeatable service and second to non photography’ for instance.
 

Yellow Pages and Yell.com
Many businesses have found that Yellow Pages advertising is not as effective as it used to be. One positive comment from one photographer was that her paid Yellow Pages advert ‘just broke even’. However, it is worth trying a free line advert but we have found that it attracts a client with a limited budget.  More localised directories can be better as they are more focussed on a smaller area and list fewer photographers, hence less choice for people.  You can also try www.yell.com on the Internet, which seems to be a little more successful.
 
 
Word of mouth
 
This can take time and effort to build up but it does happen eventually.  Always make sure you provide an excellent service alongside super photos that really capture the hearts of your clients. This will guarantee you a good reputation with good referrals, which is exactly what you need.
 
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